AMD Radeon RX Vega Specs Leak Highlights 4096 Stream Processors, 8GB HBM2 And Over 12 TFLOPs

Just as Ryzen made AMD competitive in the high-end processor market for the first time in about a decade, there is an expectation that the company's forthcoming Vega launch will do the same in the GPU arena. Of course, right now there are more questions than answers. Some of those are starting to be answered, as least speculatively, as leaks become bigger and more frequent leading up to Vega's release. The most recent leak gives us a supposed glimpse of of Vega's specifications.

A member of reddit extracted some interesting details from a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) update for Linux that was submitted by AMD. According to what is contained in the driver package, AMD's Radeon RX Vega will feature 64 next generation compute units, each with 64 GCN stream processors. That gives it 4,096 next generation GCN stream processors divided into four divisions, each of which comprises a shader engine.

To break things down even further, each 1,024 stream processor shader engine wields two asynchronous compute units, a render back-end, and four texture blocks. Inside each of those texture blocks are 16 texture mapping units, giving the graphics card a total of 256 TMUs. It also supports eight hardware threads.


The question here is, how do these specs compare to Polaris? Let's have a look. Here is a tidy breakdown of the alleged Radeon RX Vega:

• 14nm process node
• 4 shader engines
• 4,096 stream processors
• 12.5 TFLOPS / 25 (FP16) TFLOPS
• 64 render output units
• 256 texture mapping units
• 8 hardware threads
• 2,048-bit memory interface
• 8GB High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2)

And here are the specs for a Radeon RX 480 graphics card:

• 14nm process node
• 4 shader engines
• 2,304 stream processors
• 5.8 TFLOPS / 5.8 (FP16) TFLOPS
• 32 render output units
• 144 texture mapping units
• 4 hardware threads
• 256-bit memory interface
• 8GB GDDR5 memory

In all likelihood, the Linux driver points to a higher-end Vega card, one that will compete with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 or 1080 Ti (GTX 1080 Ti delivers 11.4 TFLOPs of compute) We also expect AMD to release to release lower end SKUs, perhaps with half as much memory. Nothing is set in stone or official, of course, but it would make sense for AMD to release multiple Vega cards that line up against NVIDIA's higher-end Pascal cards, from the GeForce GTX 1070 on up.

The good news is we won't be kept in suspense much longer. AMD is planning to release Vega sometime this quarter.